Film

Michael Clayton (2007)

Director: Tony Gilroy

Synopsis

Michael Clayton is an in-house ‘fixer’ at one of the largest corporate law firms in New York, doing dirty work at the behest of his boss. Though exhausted and unhappy, his divorce, a failed business venture and mounting debt have left Clayton tied to the firm. At U/North, meanwhile, the career of litigator Karen Crowder rests on the multi-million dollar settlement of a class action suit that Clayton's firm is leading to a seemingly successful conclusion. But when their brilliant and guilt-ridden attorney Arthur Edens sabotages the case, Clayton faces the biggest challenge of his career and his life.

Movie review

From Time Out Chicago

Clearly the film a veteran screenwriter was hoarding for his directorial debut, Michael Clayton opens with a blast of self-importance: Wilkinson mutters in voiceover as the camera glides through an office at night; a disheveled Clooney broods at a back-alley poker game, glumly waiting to show us what he does best. Turns out he’s Michael Clayton, an in-house “fixer” for a major New York law firm—a lawyer by training, repurposed as a behind-the-scenes clean-up man. His job runs the gamut from dealing with a client’s hit-and-run to psychoanalyzing his company’s star attorney, Arthur Edens (Wilkinson), a manic-depressive on the verge of mental collapse.

Arthur plans to leak privileged information and turn the tables on his client, U/North, the incredibly guilty subject of a class-action lawsuit. Doing his smooth-operator routine, Michael assures a U/North exec (Swinton) that Arthur will pull himself together, but she’s not convinced. One of the interesting things about Clayton is that it never persuades us of Michael’s abilities. He’s not Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction—just a guy who gets a paycheck.

Clotted with exposition, Clayton is a bracing, slow-burning character study, closer to something like The Verdict than Silkwood or A Civil Action. There’s a complexity of motivation underlying Michael’s increasing sympathy for Arthur—an unstated mix of conscience, family trouble, career dissatisfaction and simple pragmatism. Writer-director Gilroy provides a late-breaking rah-rah speech, but the movie does nothing to suggest that Michael’s triumph is fulfilling. He simply does what he does and gets on with his life.